On the examples, I think Biden won't get past the Clarence Thomas hearings and as a result it will doom his campaign. Viewed from the current lens of recent judicial appointments, and that the Democrats were the majority party in the Senate then, it looks like the old boys network and inside baseball simply blocked the truth from coming out then. There is a different angle that isn't getting reported now, that Poppy Bush was playing the race card with the Clarence Thomas nomination, as his campaign had done with the Willie Horton ads, and since Thomas would succeed Thurgood Marshall, there was some pressure (I really don't know how much) to keep an African-American seat on the court, and at the time no way to know that Poppy would not be reelected the following year. This is not to excuse Biden for how he played his cards, but simply to note that had he played them differently, the way the critics now would have wanted, then he surely would have had other critics that potentially could have doomed him now as well. From this perspective, it was a no-win situation for him. Wins, it seems, only happen when the Democrats control both the White House and the Senate. Divided government used to produce compromise, which is very messy, and now seems to produce only gridlock.
President Obama also gets his comeuppance from Dowd, and on this one we all know the history so there isn't another narrative playing in the background. The American public needed to know about Russian interference in the election in 2016, in the summer leading up to the vote. It was a big deal then as it is now. The knowledge would have influenced the election, no doubt. So it would have made the Obama administration seem partisan in the incoming election. My reaction, so what? I understand wanting to be above the fray after the 2008 election and that Obama campaigned on that theme. But there was quite a lot of experience since to suggest that the President was incapable of getting them to play nice in the Senate, most recently that the Merrick Garland nomination wasn't even considered by the Republicans. Under those circumstances - stick 'em! There would have been backlash, no doubt. But viewed in its entirety, the situation would have been much better. For one, Hillary Clinton would have been President.
I confess that the feelings of frustration about the events sometimes lead me to think dark thoughts, which usually come in one of two forms. Either the top Democrats have a "Luca Brasi unit" comprised of former Secret Service agents and Special Ops soldiers, whose job it is to go after leading Republican Senators and all those Judges who have been appointed since Trump took office, and make each of them an offer they can't refuse. Or, in this alternative, such a "Justice League" emerges on its own, unaffiliated with the Democratic leadership, but with much the same agenda as before.
I understand tit-for-tat, from a game theory perspective, and that famous Dr. Martin Luther King quote:
The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral,
begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy.
Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it.
Through violence you may murder the liar,
but you cannot murder the lie, nor establish the truth.
Through violence you may murder the hater,
but you do not murder hate.
In fact, violence merely increases hate.
So it goes.
Returning violence for violence multiplies violence,
adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars.
Darkness cannot drive out darkness:
only light can do that.
Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.
But what then to do about the bullying behavior? I do not have an answer to that question.
Instead, I start to self-critique my time as an ed tech administrator. For the most part I tried to be reasonable and I believe I was perceived as such by people on campus and elsewhere in the profession. And in a few cases I was able to clean up messes that were caused by bullies and make the situation whole again. But in my four years as Assistant CIO for Educational Technologies, after the little Center for Educational Technologies that I ran merged with the big IT organization, a merger that I opposed but did so ineffectually, I felt that bullying was part of the organization culture. The network people were particularly known for that style and soon the information security folks also embraced the style. There was rivalry between the divisions of the old IT organization, and that persisted. My direct reports got beaten up by the structure that was imposed on them, and I didn't have a means to protect them.
No too long ago I read this piece about the current state of Academic Technology. It seems that what I experienced was not unique and is still common today. Is being reasonable the answer there?
I still have some idealism left in me, as reflected by my previous very long post. When I get on an idealistic jag and write about it, I feel compelled to explain how I came to the idea, then give a fairly detailed statement about problem definition, and only then talk about programmatic reform aimed to address the problem. In this sense, being reasonable admits being zealous for an ideal, one that is not yet embraced broadly. Yet translating the idealistic thinking into an action plan that does get implemented, is something I struggled with in my administrator career. I've written elsewhere that I was better as a pinch hitter, so expressing a limited amount of creativity towards advancing somebody else's vision.
I do feel our campuses mimic our national politics, particularly at big R1s like Illinois, in ignoring the little guy and in focusing on innovation quite narrowly. Is this the inevitable consequence of well meaning and reasonable people letting it happen? We really need to think this through.
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